Tag: British government

Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World 1918-1923 Maurice Walsh Faber & Faber So much has been published about the Irish revolutionary period (1910-1923) over the course of the last few years that one has to be selective about…

One of the most popular posts on this website – for whatever reason – is Significant Commas in Irish History. While looking for something completely different, I came across an article in The Irish Jurist about the second of the…

What? The Anglo-Irish Agreement. Not to be confused with The Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921). When? Signed on 15th November 1985. Where? Hillsborough, Northern Ireland. Why? Both the UK government and the Irish government had been alarmed by the electoral and PR…

There wasn’t as much coverage of the revelations contained in declassified government papers this year as there was last year – surprising as they deal with the period of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. There are a few little gems nonetheless, such…

This book was published last year to much acclaim. There were lots of complimentary reviews, and I’m not going to dissent here from the majority view. Ronan Fanning is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at University College Dublin and this…

On 5 August 1920, Evelyn Waugh, then a schoolboy aged 16, went to visit the Houses of Parliament on the invitation of John Molson MP, father of one of his schoolfriends. He managed to get in to witness part of…

I bought this book on a whim, partly because I guessed (correctly) that it would have something in it about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is a casual interest of mine. Judging by what I’ve found on the internet, the book…

As well as teaching about Irish history, I teach English language and grammar, especially the written variety, which a lot of the time seems to mean teaching commas: where to put one, where not to put one, and why it…

I bought this on a whim last week and have now almost finished reading it. It’s based on the BBC Radio 4 radio series of the same name, which dealt with the various acts and processes that have either bound…

Every January the British National Archives prompt a flurry of historical recollections and reflections when they release a tranche of previoulsy confidential government documents under the “thirty-year rule”. This year, 1984 comes under the spotlight, a year in which the…